


Late Night Breakfast

by slimecrime



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Domestic, Fluff and Angst, Lio has a number of problems, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, brief discussion of ED, just disgustingly sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:08:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23183764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slimecrime/pseuds/slimecrime
Summary: Lio struggles with his mental health. Galo is understanding.
Relationships: Lio Fotia/Galo Thymos
Comments: 12
Kudos: 158





	Late Night Breakfast

**Author's Note:**

> could a depressed person do THIS? [projects onto an anime character]

So many nights wrapped in Galo’s arms were pleasant, loving dreams. It was warm. It was safe. He had someone who cooked for him, and who ate the meals he cooked. He had someone to talk to him, to tell him about a new show he’d started watching, to explain to him some old gundam anime that he really, really, really, cared a whole lot about, this is my favorite thing- shut up, listen, it’s my favorite thing from when I was a kid-It’s so cool please watch it with me-

But there were nights of Lio’s life that still managed to be bad, regardless of how tightly he was held. It didn’t matter how warm or strong or kind or in love with him Galo was. He would still awaken at 4 am, desperately dragging himself out of a dream filled with nothing but anguish strangling him. 

Tonight, it seems, he is gripped incurably by the seering ghost of unbridled pain. His mind puts in front of him, without any consent, and without any warning, thousands of screaming burnish and Kray Foresight’s hideous face. Kray Foresight’s mouth, his teeth, his eyes and skin. His voice doesn’t match him, and the harder Lio tries to look away, the more his mind forces him to look. And, of course, of course, the pain. 

A feeling of dragging thousands of burning needles up from his core and through his muscles and out his skin, over and over and over and over. Stabbing, ripping, burning, pain shooting from his bones to his skin and somehow deeper beyond that. 

And then, the anger, hate, pain, and sorrow of an unspeakable number of others feeling the very same thing, all flowing like white hot lead into every part of him. 

And he can’t, can’t, CAN’T, CAN’T seem to get it to just stop. He knows somewhere, somewhere in his mind, that this isn’t really happening to him. He knows, deep down, that this isn’t real right now, that he is probably safe, but his brain just won’t leave him alone. 

He can barely feel it when Galo rubs his hand up and down his shoulder. He’s so unbelievably numb to the outside world. His eyes might be open- Oh, his eyes are open? But he can’t process anything in front of him. 

He can feel his chest heaving uselessly as he tries to take a single breath. His ribs shake as they try to remember what to do. Is he trying to inhale or exhale? It doesn’t matter, neither work.

“Lio. Lio,” he hears him whisper. 

“Everything’s over now,” he hears. “It’s over now.” 

He knows that! He knows that. That doesn’t help-

He takes a single breath, finally, and lets it out, finally. The next few are shaky, watery, but functional. 

He feels his hands in his hair. It’s too much. Everything hurts too much. He pushes them back. 

“I’m sorry-”

Lio get’s off the bed. He’s not sure how, but he’s quickly standing on the floor and pacing. He can feel his feet on rough carpet. 

Oh, he’s standing. Okay, he’s standing. He’s standing. Okay. 

He breathes again. 

His vision is still clouded with bright glowing lights and Kray Foresight’s awful face, but he starts to recognize his home again. He leans his hands down on the bed spread. Soft. Rust colored. He bought this with Galo. 

“Lio, you’re alive and in our room,” he hears. 

He knows that. He knows that!

“I know!” he wheezes out. 

Galo inhales sharply. There is silence while both of them simply do their best to breathe. 

“I know. I’m sorry,” Lio says. Kray still sits behind his eyes and leers at him. Screaming is still loud inside his skull. 

“It’s okay,” Galo says. 

Lio looks around the room. His vision is fine, but it’s like he can’t really look at anything. 

“Do you want me to help?” he asks. 

Lio swallows. 

“Yes,” he finally says. 

“Okay. You should tell me five things that are in this room, and then I’ll get you some water,” he says. 

He steadies himself, and looks up from his hands on the bedspread. Galo is sitting up in bed, watching him. He puts all his energy into looking at him. 

“Your hair is blue,” he says. “There’s a lamp behind you.”

“The walls are white. There’s a bunch of posters on the walls.”

“There’s a shit load of empty cans on the nightstand.” 

“There’s the chair with clothes on it.” 

His brain starts to let him live in the space again, even if it’s just a bit. Reality does become sharper, calmer, more solid. His mind is still flooded with disgusting memories, but he hopes they’re beginning to drain. 

“Okay,” Galo says. “I’m gonna leave for a second and then I’ll be back.”

Galo gets up from the bed, removing the covers from his legs and causing the mattress to spring and rock. Lio doesn’t move from where he is. He keeps looking hard at his surroundings, naming off things to himself. 

He names all the characters in the posters. He names all the brands on the soda and beer cans. 

He stares hard into their closet and counts how many shirts are hanging up.

Galo, though, returns quickly. He tosses a bag of chips down on the bed and hands him a glass of water. 

Lio takes it in his hand and stands upright. It’s smooth and cold and has weight. He drinks it quickly, taking note of the way it feels in his mouth and going down his throat. 

He mistakenly closes his eyes for a moment and is greeted only with glowing pain and Kray.

However, Galo is eating the chips. 

“I thought we weren’t eating chips in bed anymore,” Lio says, unsure when he’d thought to say it, and feeling as though his voice had come from somewhere else. 

“Yeah, but eating stuff is a grounding technique. I think,” he says. “I don’t know. I used to get like this, after my parents died, and eating helped me.” 

Lio sits down on the bed, reluctantly. He is torn between curling up in Galo’s arms and eating chips with him and going outside and running for several miles until he collapses from exhaustion. 

He takes another sip of water before putting it down on the table besides the bed.

Completely on auto pilot, Lio puts himself close up against Galo’s chest, in his arms, practically in his lap but not quite. His legs are skinny and cold against his, one of them draped around his thigh. He puts his head into the crook of his neck and takes a chip out of the bag.

He barely tastes it. It takes almost a whole handful of chips before he notices anything about them. 

“These’re cheddar sour cream?” he says. 

“Yeah.”

“Gross.”

“Well, you’re eating them.”

He does keep eating them. He’s tired and wants to sleep, but he still can’t close his eyes without his brain reminding him, over and over and over again, of Kray.

He comes to realize Galo’s arm is around his middle. 

“You can’t kiss me now because of these chips, and I can’t kiss you,” he says. “Big mistake.” 

Galo crumples the bag up reluctantly, clips it closed, dusts off his hands and takes a drink of his own water. He pulls his laptop off the nightstand. 

They lay with the laptop on his chest, letting videos play. Lio isn’t sure he’s really watching them. He’s seeing them on the screen, but they move by in a rush. Galo reacts to them, laughing at them, trying to get him to laugh. And Lio does laugh, but it doesn’t feel like him. It feels like someone else is doing it for him.

Kray Foresite’s face still lingers threateningly at the edges of his vision. All the focus in the world doesn’t keep that out. His hands paw over Galo’s stomach, stretching his shirt back and forth. Galo’s arm is still warm around his ribs. 

“You still have dreams like this, too, though,” Lio says. 

“What?”

“You said you haven’t felt like this since you were a teenager, but you do this same thing.”

Galo sighs. 

“I know, but… I just mean that that’s when I first learned how to deal with it,” he says.

Lio hates watching Galo when he’s going through this, so he knows how it must feel. Of course, both of them knowing what it’s like to be trapped inside your own brain, forced to watch horrific events unfold over and over again, helps them help each other. But it also means that either of them panicking risks triggering the other.

“Are you okay?” Lio asks. 

“Yeah. I’m fine,” he assures him. 

Lio can infer that that probably isn’t entirely true, but he doesn’t press. Galo moves the laptop, though, so that it’s off of his chest and next to Lio. Then he readjusts so that he can lay on his side and wrap his arms completely around his middle. 

Galo buries his face into Lio’s hair, and holds him very tightly. He keeps playing new videos. Eventually they’re exclusively watching cooking channels. The sun is starting to come up. 

Around 7:00 am, they both fall asleep again, finally. 

Kray still lingers in the background radiation, but Lio is able to keep him mostly out of his dreams for now. 

They both have to work later.

\----

Lio unlocks the apartment door and comes home to the smell of bacon and pancakes. 

“Hey, you want 10 o’clock dinner breakfast?” Galo says as enthusiastically as he can through a yawn. 

Lio doesn’t take his coat off yet, but walks over to lean on the counter of the kitchenette. There is very little room between Galo, the stove, and the opposing counter, so he tries his best to not be in the way.

“Yeah, I love 10 o’clock dinner breakfast,” he says.

Galo scrapes the burning pancakes off the bottom of their poor, poor, frying pan to flip them once. Then he attends to the bacon in the oven. He grabs the oven mit hanging from the cabinet next to the stove. He opens the door and pulls out the tray, laying it down on the empty half of the stove with an uncharacteristic level of care. 

Lio is immediately even more enthralled by the tantalizing smell of late night breakfast. 

Then Galo tosses the oven mitt to Lio’s face. 

“That’s for you to examine,” he says. “Memorize its shape.”

“I haven’t done that in six months and I was tired,” Lio says, letting the oven mitt hit his face and fall to the floor. He doesn’t even flinch. 

The pale white scars on the palms of his hands were the first he had received about a month after being stripped of the Promare. They were sort of like a little “welcome to reality” present, he could say. Or perhaps “welcome to mortality” was more like it.

He picks up the oven mitt and puts it back where it belongs, just squeezing past Galo in their tiny kitchen. 

Galo dumps his current batch of pancakes onto a plate on the only available counter space. Then he goes to pour the next batch. 

What little counter they have is completely taken up by the huge bowl of batter, the general mess he’s already made, and the general mess that was already present. There was also an array of potential toppings in a little pile in the corner. 

“Do you want anything on it? Blueberries? M&M’s? More bacon? I was thinking I was gonna crumble up the bacon and put it directly into at least one of the pancakes,” he says.

Lio edges out of the small corner between Galo and the counter. 

“Just blueberries is fine,” he says, reaching over him to grab a piece of (still sizzling) bacon off the tray.

It burns him a little, and he inhales sharply through his teeth and drops it. 

“Ouch. Fuck…”

“What did we just talk about?!” 

Galo shoves him to the side, away from the cooling bacon. 

Lio ignores him and tries once again to pick up the bacon, this time with the very tips of his fingers. It burns him again. 

“I can’t believe this. _I’m_ supposed to be the idiot in this house,” Galo says, wrapping his arms around Lio’s waist and lifting him off the floor. He picks him up and walks him over to the living room. Lio can barely get out a proper protest before he’s being fully tossed toward the couch. 

“I’m not gonna do it again- I understand that it’s too hot now- Your idiot germs are infectious- Listen-”

He lands in the cushions (and maybe a little trash) (just some mail or something) and his wallet falls out of his pants pocket. 

“I can’t believe what my life has become,” he groans. “I was an activist and the leader of a massively powerful Burnish gang and now I’m not even allowed to decide when to eat bacon in my own house?”

He doesn’t get up from where he lays, deciding that this is perfectly comfortable, actually. 

“I told you, I’d protect you from anything,” Galo says. “Even if it’s your own very bad instincts.” 

Lio sighs and lets his arm drape over the side of the couch, fingers just brushing the floor. Now that he’s on his back, he’s not sure he can get up again. His legs are really tired, he realizes. All of his muscles ache. He hasn’t even taken his shoes off. 

He kicks off his ankle boots and finger combs his hair. Maybe he should take off his jacket eventually.

“Hmm, you know what isn’t fair?” Lio says. “That you can’t wear my jacket.” 

Galo flips his pancakes, which seem to be burning less this time. 

“Yeah, but you can wear _my_ jacket and that’s pretty cute,” he says. 

“I’m not denying that it isn’t cute,” he says. “I just think you’d look hot in a leather jacket, and especially so if it was mine.” 

Galo pulls the bacon off the cookie sheet (with a fork. Just to rub it in.) and lays it all on a piece of paper towel. It barely fits on the counter. 

“Well, I could get a leather jacket,” he says. 

“You should get a leather jacket,” Lio agrees.

“I should get a leather jacket.”

“I’ll get you a leather jacket.”

Galo lifts up the pancakes with the spatula to check to see if they’re done. 

“You don’t have to get me anything.”

“It’s a very self serving gift, if that helps.”

Lio puts his arms behind his head and just watches him cook. The kitchen is a disaster and he tries not to think about how they’re going to have to clean up after this. Galo’s shirt is covered in flour, and so is the cabinet that he knows the flour came out of. 

But, he thinks very warmly, that this is a life he never thought he could ever have. Not in his lifetime. Absolutely not. Not him. Not a high-level, extremely wanted Burnish with a bounty on his head like Lio Fotia. 

No, he had been doomed so many years ago to a life of running and starving and watching his friends die. There was no way he could’ve held another man so softly in his arms at night. There was no way, if he was ever in a relationship at all, that he’d feel so-

Safe.

So loved.

So warm.

It’s always possible that this isn’t real. He thinks about it almost every day. There’s always the possibility that one day, he’ll wake up in a Burnish camp, in the seat of a flaming motorcycle, heart practically beating out of his chest. 

His life is nearly unrecognizable from what it once was. He has such an unbelievable amount of time to eat and sleep. 

He’s not only gained weight recently, but he didn’t even notice until he had to go to a doctor (and he was able to go to a doctor!) because he’d finally stopped obsessing over every inch of his body. It was impossible to believe how comfortable his lifestyle had become. 

Galo dumps the pancakes onto the plate with the others he’s made. 

“You can come get them if you want,” he says. 

Without any warning, Lio suddenly has to fight himself as his eyes well up with a need to cry.

He swallows it, though. Or tries to. He’s happy. He doesn’t want to cry right now.

Lio gets off the couch and walks back over to the kitchenette. He squeezes behind Galo again, to get to the cabinet to get a plate, and then reaches around him to get to the drawer to get a fork. He plates up a few of the blueberry waffles while Galo scrapes the rest of the batter into the pan. 

As he goes to walk back to the couch, Galo stops him.

“Ah! Wait…” he says. He reaches over and pulls a few m&m’s out of the bag sitting on the counter and drops them over Lio’s pancakes. 

“Garnish,” he says. He thinks this is very funny. He’s very proud of himself. 

Lio can’t cry about how weird and warm that makes him feel because that’s the stupidest thing to possibly start crying over. This is the worst. This is embarrassing. This is horrible. 

“Thank you,” he says gently, before squeezing passed him again to get to the fridge. He opens the door and uses it to block his face while he collects himself. 

He stares into the empty white light of the refrigerator for just a little too long.

“We don’t have any syrup. You made pancakes without checking to see if we had syrup,” he says, laughing. His voice cracks just a tiny bit, though, and he hopes Galo doesn’t notice. 

“There’s jelly, though,” Galo says. “Because you keep buying different kinds of jelly every week.” 

“Oh, okay,” Lio agrees, still laughing, still almost crying. Maybe actually crying. 

He pulls one of the (possibly embarrassingly numerous) jars out of the fridge and starts to drown the blueberry pancakes in raspberry preserves. He really, really, really, doesn’t want to cry right now.

Galo glances at him, but doesn’t say anything. 

“I’m not upset about the syrup, I just have depression and I love you,” he assures him. 

“Okay. I love you too,” he says, squeezing his shoulder before going back to flipping pancakes. He does as he previously said he would, and picks up a strip of bacon and tears it up into little bits to sprinkle into two of the pancakes. One of them already had m&m’s in it. 

Lio leans on the counter over his pancakes, his back to Galo. He digs into his blueberry pancakes, now drowning in jelly and a few m&m’s, and puts a sickeningly sweet bite into his mouth. The slightly bitter taste of the maybe-not-perfectly-ripe blueberries helps with the sweetness a little bit. 

“These are so good,” he says. 

“Yeah, dude. It’s how my dad used to make them when I was really little,” he says. 

Lio shoves another mouthful of sugary jelly covered pancake into his mouth. He feels a little guilt, a little sorrow, but doesn’t say as much. He feels a little hatred for- Him. That man. For doing so much to Galo that he didn’t deserve, for taking so much from him. For being such a disgraceful, horrendous Burnish. 

And he keeps quiet, knowing Gallo didn’t say that to try to make him sad, or kill the mood, that it’s just a part of his life. 

But he does cry, finally. Just a little. And he does have to fight that man out of his eyes. Just a little.

“Your dad made good pancakes,” he says with his mouth full. 

“Mmhmm,” Galo says happily, turning off the stove. He pulls his own plate out of the cabinet and serves himself his own pancakes. They’re covered in m&m’s and bacon. He opens the fridge to retrieve the strawberry jelly to soak them in.

He leans against the counter next to the stove, and they both eat together quietly. 

“You can eat the bacon now, too,” Galo reminds him, just as Lio is almost done with his pancakes. 

“Oh, I forgot about the bacon,” he says. He puts the last bite into his mouth before turning and adding two strips of bacon to his plate. 

He thinks about how upset it would’ve made him to eat this much at once just a year ago. He still feels sort of worried about it, of course. It’s not like it’s something he’s completely gotten over. It was much, much, easier for him to run out of excuses now, though, and outweigh them with reasons not to worry about it. 

After all, he and his friends had easy access to food, so he couldn’t just say, “Well, it’s more important for them to eat than me.” And, another strange feeling was that he knew the people in his life would want him to eat. This was slightly different from when he would feel obligated to eat, solely for the sake of having the energy to take care of his people. He’s not sure Guiera or Meis ever even knew, or at least he’d like to think so.

Lio had a lot to talk to his therapist about every Tuesday. 

He sighs and eats a strip of bacon. 

Galo scrapes what’s left on his plate onto his fork and eats it before putting his plate into the sink next to Lio. Then, he picks up one of the remaining plain pancakes and starts idly pulling it apart and eating it.

“Do you want any more of these?” Galo asks.

“No, I think I’m okay,” Lio says. 

“Well, we’ll have them for tomorrow,” he says.

The pure bliss of late night pancakes slowly melts into the disappointment of late night kitchen cleaning. Together, and exhausted, they both struggle to come to terms with the fact that the kitchen now has to be cleaned up.

\----

Lio lays quietly under the covers, almost asleep, when Galo joins him again. The mattress rocks as he lays down next to him, and he can smell the piney scent of his shampoo. His hair is damp. 

He feels him kiss him quickly on the cheek before rolling over to lay on his side. 

Lio sits up momentarily, to lean over him and return the favor. Then he lays back down against Galo’s back and falls asleep.


End file.
